IE Feedback: Looking Back, Forging Ahead

IE9 users significantly impacted the engineering process and product with high quality,
high value feedback. It is for this reason that we are pleased to announce that
the Internet Explorer Feedback Program will remain open on an ongoing basis. Users
continue to be able to search, reactivate, or log new bugs on
Connect, and the IE team will continue to investigate and resolve them.

We would like to reiterate our
deep appreciation and thanks for the time and effort our users invested
in helping us to make a better product. We provided the specifics on the huge impact
of feedback in our
RC
blog
posts – in this post we’ll take a last look at the feedback data
from IE9 and discuss the ongoing process as we look ahead to the next release.

The Numbers

For the Beta, we received over 17,000 bugs. The earlier Platform Previews and the
RC added over 6,000 more pieces of feedback to that, resulting in 23,376 pre-release
bugs logged on Connect in almost exactly
1 year. When you add to this the over 21,000 comments and 8,000 validations, we
received over 52,000 pieces of feedback from over 10,000 users. This is a huge response,
and we are both proud to have attracted such interest and thankful for the support
of our community. If every user spent just 2 minutes to find an issue, search for
a bug, and then either create a new bug, validate the existing bug, or comment on
it, you’d end up with over 200 business days of engineering assistance to the IE
team.

Perspective

When we launched the
IE8 feedback process, we talked about the overwhelming response of the public
IE7 feedback program leading us to introduce an invitation-only program. As we discussed
when we launched the public
IE9 Platform Preview Feedback program, the
opinions expressed in the
comments were clear on that decision for IE8. For IE7, the public
feedback program generated 10,905 bugs over roughly 16 months, or 681 bugs per month;
it was 1,948 bugs per month for IE9, almost triple the volume. We knew that with
a more connected world, frequent Platform Preview releases, and by making it easier
to log bugs using the Send Feedback Tool we’d receive significantly more bugs than
ever before, but we also knew that only through great feedback would we be able
to deliver a browser that met our customers’ needs.

Maintaining the Feedback Loop

When we started IE8 and over the course of IE9, users
expressed
disappointment over the lack of continuity in feedback loop. With the
start of IE9 we remedied the problem with losing bugs against previous releases
– you now can search across both IE8 and IE9 for bugs. As we wrap up IE9, it is
because we know that great feedback makes a great product that the Internet Explorer
Feedback Program will remain open. Users can go to
Connect to log bugs against IE9 RTM, and we will triage these bugs and resolve
them as they are addressed in future releases of Internet Explorer. As before, we
ask that developers and consumers provide us feedback on the Web platform and the
user experience of IE9:

Do the new capabilities (HTML5, Tracking Protection Lists, etc) function as we’ve
described them?

Do they do what you’d expect?

Do you experience reliability or performance issues when using any of them?

At the same time, now that we have released the final version of IE9, we are no
longer accepting bugs logged against the Beta or Release Candidate. We ask that
users install the IE9 RTM, retry their
scenario, and reactivate their bug in Connect
if it is still an issue.

Wrapping up IE9

While we review and prioritize your incoming RTM bug reports, we will continue to
close down pre-release IE9 feedback. We will be looking at the bugs you have reactivated,
the final bugs that came in over the last week of the RC, and the bugs where you
have added comments or validations after the release of the RTM. Just as we committed
to when we talked about
Product Feedback Systems, every single bug will be reviewed and we will keep
you informed as they are addressed.